Léon Bloy / Richard Robinson
The Resurrection of Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam, by Léon Bloy, originally published in 1906, 15 years after Villiersʼ passing, is as much an homage to Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam - his literary corpus and genius - as it is a plea to Thomas Edison to help subscribe monetarily to the statue, sculpted in marble, by Frédéric Brou. 'And now, itʼs to you that I address myself, Thomas Alva Edison. Will you not do anything for him who did so much for you? If you are known in France other than by your inventions, the ʻsorcerer of Menlo Park,ʼ it is because of Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam...'Villiers had written The Future Eve, whose main character, or protagonist, was Edison. 'The central preoccupation, the umbilicus, of the singular poet that was the author of The Future Eve was, and this is something that must be completely intolerable to imbeciles, his really unprecedented need for a restitution of woman... It has nothing to do with or a pleading, with a dithyrambic paranymph, with such and such fawning praise for the dangerous Sex. It has to do with a renewal of earthly Paradise, after the harsh winter of six thousand years. It has to do with rediscovering that famous Garden of Voluptuousness, symbol and accomplishment of Woman, which all men search gropingly for throughout the centuries.''In any case, she lived within him, in what a frothy life! and that is her whom I see pulling off the boards of his coffin!'
